Research Methodology for Inspecting Typography and Images in Arabic Websites

Table of Links

Abstract and I. Introduction

II. Previous Works

III. Research Methodology

IV. Font and Image Inspection Studies

V. Results

VI. Discussion

VII. Conclusions, Future Research Directions, and References

III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Evaluation methods of websites‟ usability vary greatly in regard to the procedures, complexity, and accuracy [27]. Usability inspection is the second most used web usability evaluation method after user testing [27], [9]. In simple terms, usability inspection refers to the methods that are employed by an evaluator to inspect usability issues or features of a specific user interface [9]. In our case, we concentrate on two main design elements; firstly we inspect the quality of the typography of 73 Arabic websites and the genre of images used within these websites and secondly we verify the agreement of these design elements (i. e. typography and images) with the proposed international design guidelines. The steps of the evaluation we performed are depicted in Fig. 1.

This form of inspection is called „perspective-based inspection‟ where the evaluator concentrates on particular design elements [28]. It is worthwhile to note that inspection differs from user testing for it does not involve actual users in the evaluation process. This makes it more favorable especially when the number of websites to test is large as is our case. Moreover, conducting usability inspection is still considered useful and more affordable than other evaluation techniques [29].